The Mandela files (3): Encounters

Of the four encounters I was privileged to have with Nelson Mandela, the second was the most revelatory.

Many of his defining attributes that the entire world has been remarking and celebrating since his death three weeks shone through splendidly in that encounter – his graciousness, the deep emotional reserve he guarded tenaciously the way he must have guarded his face in the boxing ring, and his resoluteness..

But first, some background.

General Olusegun Obasanjo had served as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that had recommended economic sanctions and other measures that, together with the altered international environment – glasnost, perestroika, and all that – and the black insurrection in South Africa, moved the ruling regime to abandon petty apartheid and to begin seriously to contemplate a future without that pernicious doctrine.

During the EPG mission, in 1986, he had struck a relationship with Nelson Mandela, then languishing in prison. He had strengthened the relationship when he hosted Mandela and his wife Winnie to a rousing reception at his farm in Otta when they visited Nigeria in May 1990. Some three months later, Obasanjo was headed for South Africa, on a mission “to listen, learn and encourage” the transition then slowly unfolding.

I had asked to company him on the trip to get the kind of access that an earlier visit did not provide. Also on the trip were his friend and confidant, the engineer and industrialist Obafemi Olopade, Dr Yusuf Maiangwa, since deceased, director of the Africa Leadership Forum, and former Nigerian High Commissioner to Canada, on leave from Ahmadu Bello University, where he was a professor of French, and two security aides.

The visit could not have started on a less promising note.

Within an hour of our landing at Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg, on July 25, 1990, well before General Obasanjo could brief Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of his mission, state radio had broadcast the news. Something told me that Mandela would at the very least regard this as a misstep, and would not take kindly to it.

Early on July 26, 1990, the first full day of our visit, official state radio announced that a plot by the South African Communist Party and some elements of the African National Congress to overthrow the government by force had been uncovered. Specifically, it reported that Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC National Executive, had been arrested in the investigation of the plot.

To underscore the gravity of the situation, the government had detailed its intelligence chief, the intense and precise Dr Neil Barnard, to brief Obasanjo and his team on their arrival in Pretoria to meet with senior government officials.

Barnard and other spokespersons were careful to point out that Mandela was not personally involved in the plot, which they characterised as a “betrayal of trust” that could undermine the peace process “before any significant milestone” was reached and, perhaps more ominously, “threaten the fragile peace in the sub-region.”

As a condition for restoring trust, they demanded that Maharaj and Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP, be dropped from the ANC’s negotiating team.

This was the unpromising backdrop to our meeting with Mandela at the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg later that day – a day on which state radio announced repeatedly and to the ANC’s consternation, that Obasanjo had arrived to listen, learn and encourage.

We were ushered into Mandela’s cluttered office as senior members of the ANC were dispersing after concluding a strategy meeting at which they issued a defiant rebuttal to the government ‘s claim that the SACP and ANC were plotting to overthrow it

Preliminaries were less strained than I had expected. Half-way through, a young woman with a battery of cameras entered the room, and as she tip-toed round the conference table to go into an adjoining room, Mandela accosted her.

“Mandissa, where have you been?” he said. “I haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

The young woman, a photographer for the ANC, replied that she had been away on an official assignment.

“I wanted to give you a copy of my new book,” he said. Grabbing a copy of No Easy Walk to Freedom from a desk, he autographed it and handed it to her.

That was the essential Mandela, the person who always looked out for those who did the grunt work but on whom the klieg lights rarely shone and who never made the headlines and the front pages.

Then, Mandela turned to Obasanjo and asked him to introduce his team. At the mention of Olopade’s first name, Obafemi, Mandela instantly made a connection with the more famous bearer of that name, Chief Awolowo, who had died some three years earlier. Twenty-seven years in prison, without access to the news media, had not dulled his memory.

Mandela would debrief Obasanjo and his team several hours later in the house that Winnie built, in the West Orlando neighbourhood of Soweto, while he was in prison – an elegant affair but by no means the most elegant there, and far from opulent.

“Whom have you been talking with?” he began, notepad before him and pen in hand.

As Obasanjo told him about what had transpired in our earlier appointments, you saw Mandela the patient listener, the meticulous note-taker and the skilled interrogator all rolled into one.

When we met him in the Cabinet Room in the Union Buildings in Pretoria — he had jokingly remarked that I was sitting in the chair usually occupied by the Defence Minister, General Magnus Malan — I had asked President Frederik de Klerk to sketch a time frame for the transition.

Pulling out my notebook, I relayed his response to Mandela.

“Difficult,” de Klerk had said. That year -1990 – and the next would be crucial and dynamic. “Certainly, no new election would be held under the present (apartheid) constitution. We are in a hurry. We are not playing games. We are not looking at ten or even five years from now . . .”

“No new election will be held under the present constitution?” Mandela repeated slowly and deliberately.

“Exactly what he said, sir,” I replied, looking toward Obasanjo for confirmation.

Obasanjo confirmed that I had correctly reported de Klerk.

All this was news to Mandela. He had never been told that much by de Klerk, who kept his cards fairly close to his chest, and may indeed have used our visit to telegraph to Mandela and the ANC that he was s person with whom they could do serious business.

If Mandela was in the least excited by this development that had the markings of a game-changer in South Africa’s tortuous history, he did not show it. The deep, emotional reserve that had been his armour had supervened.

But the fighter in Mandela broke through the emotional dam when Obasanjo informed him that, because South African Airways was grounded by a strike, he had offered the leader of the rival, hard-line Pan Africanist Congress, Zeph Mothopeng, a ride to Lagos the following day on the Falcon 600 executive jet that military president Ibrahim Babangida had provided for our trip.

“Ólù,” he said, looking Obasanjo in the face and wagging the index finger of his right hand, “don’t have anything to do with that chap. If you do, you will lose all your friends here in South Africa.”

He was firm, resolute. He expected no buts and no ifs, and he got none.

General Obasanjo would call later to tell Mothopeng that his travel plans had changed, as indeed they had. He would not be flying to Lagos the next day after all. Instead, he would fly to Ulundi, in KwaZulu-Natal, for a meeting with the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was seething with resentment that he had been marginalised in the on-going negotiations.

From there, he would proceed to the Zambian capital Lusaka to brief President Kenneth Kaunda, chair of the Frontline States, on his mission, and the team would spend the night there as Kaunda’s guests.

*Third and final installment of a retrospective on Nelson Mandela. Some of the material here first appeared in my reporting for The Guardian Sunday Magazine (August 5, 1990), titled “Tracking Apartheid’s Changing Face”.